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I’m doing the rounds of SYSPRO Africa’s offices. It’s Monday 30 June 2031 (my birthday), and SaloME, chatbot and partner of KenDO, our latest chat releases, have everything under control. Having already arranged my trip, they just completed agreed roles and actions I set up with them via SYSPRO GOsist.

Travel Scheduler, KenGO Travel – meetings, hotels, flights and local collections all planned, sorted, reconfirmed via SYSPRO Move, so much easier than Outlook Global we used to use from MacroSoft after their move to enterprise enablement.

Colleague, KenGO BusCentral – reminding/advising me of key actions I must sort and deals I need to close with each of the people I am likely to meet. Plus joking about some subjects that make these business associates tick. On early release, but so much more fun to teach and interact with than our CRM 2020.

Espresso ActiveEAR beeps telling me UberAir has moved my car outside and is ready to drop me at Jomo Kenyata airport. Another great feature of ‘SYSPRO 2031’ is our seamless integration to the DHL AutoVia autonomous-vehicle IoT mobile network, letting me use my own car with the Espresso onboard-Uber module.

Overcoming driverless transport and logistics challenges in Africa was a learning journey:

Driving policy: Only 10% of the problem, but easy, a clear cut hierarchy of rules per country

Prediction of what may happen using global ‘what-if’ probability and forecasting algorithms to make the right decisions.

On the 75% solar powered plane now. The car dropped me at the UberAir jumpoint – checked-in as I handed my luggage to the lug-bot. At my seat, the Uber Info Centre automatically says “hello again and happy birthday Doug” and suggests what I might like to eat, watch, or hear on this leg of my journey.

I’m visiting our manufacturing-focused offices – starting at HQ in Nairobi, then Addis Ababa for the growing pharmaceutical customer base, then Lagos and Casablanca where food is the story, finally Kinshasa and Luanda’s mining supply chains and a host of medium-size metal fabricators.

SaloME FaceChats to remind me of my next trip to see our customers in Lesotho and Swaziland since manufacturing has taken off there with Chinese funding and low cost labor.

Recipe cost and formulation optimization – through AI integration to local supplier and our stock availability as well as nutrition/health info to design/procure/make food optimally minimizing ingredient and water wastage while optimizing health

And finally, for those people I cannot meet, we’ll use SYSPRO V-Room (a virtual-reality meeting platform). KenGO will take minutes and update SYSPRO BusCentral simultaneously, supporting colleague collaboration to help us help customers extract maximum value from SYSPRO people, processes and technology.

Doug Hunter

Doug currently heads up Product Services for SYSPRO Africa.

He has been a Scotsman in Africa for 30 years. He spent 14 of them at SAP through their initial to recent SCM solution growth. His last role there was Head of Africa Pre-Sales. He has worked in SADC, East, West and Francophone Africa.

At heart he’s a manufacturing/logistics business professional - rather than an IT techie. His passion is to help companies discover and implement innovation using people, processes and appropriate business IT.

Doug enjoys writing, traveling, mountain bike riding and drinking Malt Whisky - but not at the same time!